It’s been 5 years since the first official World Humanitarian Day, August 19th 2009. The UN sanctioned the day in memory of the suicide bombing of the Canal Hotel, the UN Headquarters in Baghdad on that day in 2003. 11 years ago today, a suicide bomber drove a flatbed truck into the UN compound, parked beneath the window of the UN Special Representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and detonated his payload. 22 people, including de Mello himself, were killed, most of them UN personnel.

World Humanitarian Day commemorates their sacrifice, but also remembers aid workers who are targeted by violence while carrying out their work on behalf of populations in need around the world. Each year, and in increasing numbers, scores of aid workers experience violence in the field while bringing aid to people affected by war and disaster. Many, like de Mello and the 21 others who died August 19th 2003, pay with their lives.

As somebody who was involved in a serious security incident some years back, today is a day that means something to me, too, and a chance for me to reflect on the co-workers who were with me that day, some of whom still carry the wounds they sustained. Many of my friends and colleagues in the aid industry have themselves survived security incidents, and many have lost friends and colleagues to violence.

The Aid Worker Security Database is a project which compiles global information about attacks on aid workers. Specifically it looks at acts of violence (as opposed to accidents and illness, which claim even more lives) in which aid workers are killed, seriously injured or kidnapped. The project began gathering data in 1997, so that now, 17 years on, it’s becoming easier to determine trends in the sector.

In 2013, thirteen years on, the database recorded 251 violent incidents against aid workers, with 460 aid workers caught up in violence. 155 aid workers were killed, 171 injured, and 134 kidnapped. 59 were expatriates (13%) while 401 (87%) were national staff.

The 11-year mean has seen an average of 112 attacks per year against aid workers, with 217 aid workers involved. 80 aid workers a year have been killed, 80 a year injured and 58 a year kidnapped. On average, 18% of aid workers involved in violence are expatriates, while 82% are nationals.

Since 2000, there has been a dramatic shift in the security landscape for aid workers. While the dataset is still relatively small, what is reflected in the figures is backed up by anecdotal evidence from the field, by individual agencies’ experiences and records (most large agencies and the UN have their own internal security incident tracking database for analysis and risk management purposes), and by trends and behaviours within belligerent groups.

Note as well that the AWSD only captures the top end of security incidents- instances of death, serious injury or kidnapping. It excludes less serious incidents (illegal detentions, muggings, threats, robberies, etc.). The AWSD does not factor in the psychological consequences of these incidents, which for victims of violence, including rape, can include a lifetime of psychological distress or struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (a report by the Antares Foundation this year reported up to 30% of aid workers exhibit symptoms of PTSD upon returning from the field). It also doesn’t capture the ‘near misses’- times when good management or pure luck has averted a much more serious incident in the field.

On top of this, remember that since 2000 (when most agencies considered themselves ‘neutral’ and therefore relatively immune to being targeted by hostile actors), the UN and other international aid agencies have seen a massive increase in their risk management strategies- increasing their protective and deterrent measures in particular to make it harder for them to be targeted, and generally trying to reduce their exposure to threats.

Despite all this, there has still been a huge increase in incidents and casualties in the field. Between 2000 and 2013 there has been a six-fold increase in the number of attacks, a five-fold increase in the number of casualties, with deaths up 270%, injuries up 740%, and kidnapping up by a substantial 12-fold increase. The only trend that has remained relatively constant is the proportion of expatriate vs. national staff involved in attacks, which hovers for the most part in the 15-20% range.

Overall, the absolute numbers of aid workers in the field (national and expatriate) has increased- so the rate of attacks on aid workers is not quite as pronounced. The AWSD estimates a modest increase in the attack rate against aid workers over the study period, without divulging the precise figures (they are based on its estimates of numbers of aid workers in the field- a difficult figure to pin down).

During the period 2006-2012, this fluctuated between 40 and 60 victims per 100,000 aid workers. Using the average figure of 50 victims per 100,000 aid workers, this results in a probability of a 1 in 2,000 chance of becoming victim of a serious attack as an aid worker. In perspective, the chance of being hit by lightning is estimated at 1 in 1.6 million. The chance of dying in a plane crash (if flying one of the world’s bottom-rated 25 airlines) is 1 in 800,000. The chance of dying in a plane crash (if flying one of the world’s top-rated 25 airlines) is 1 in 12 million. The chance of being killed in a car crash this year is about 1 in 7,000.

There are some key trends we can draw out of these figures.

Kidnapping is a rapidly growing threat.

The sheer number of aid worker kidnappings- from 11 in 2000 to 134 in 2013- is not just a statistical spike, but reflective of a well-understood development within the operational mandate of belligerent groups. Since the globalization of al Qaeda, its subsidiaries (AQIM, AQAP) and other similar extremist insurgency groups such as al Shabaab and the Taliban, their own experience has taught them that kidnap for ransom is an extremely lucrative trade. Indeed the rapid growth of AQIM in particular has been substantially attributed to the ransom payouts by European nations for the safe release of kidnapped nationals.

As such, AQ has developed guidelines for how to run a kidnap-for-ransom operation targeting foreigners, which has been widely disseminated, and acted upon. And because in the areas where these groups operate, aid workers make up a large, visible and vulnerable population of foreigners, it’s not surprising that they are frequently targeted. In fact, until this year, aid workers have been the #1 victims of overseas kidnap-for-ransom operations. In 2014, employees of global corporations apparently face a higher kidnap risk than aid workers now. But the threat to aid workers is so pronounced that the AWSD released their key 2012 report with the title “The New Normal: Coping with the Kidnapping Threat”.

If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that kidnappings are, overall, survivable. While in the earlier years of the Iraq insurgency (2003-5) there were a number of high-profile executions of kidnapped foreigners, AQ and its partner agencies have realised that there is a better business-model, and as such, kidnapped foreigners are quite clearly valuable assets, worth protecting to exchange for prisoners or large sums of money. Since 1997, just 14% of aid worker kidnappings have resulted in the death of the hostage- and most of these deaths have occurred either during the hostage-taking itself (generally agreed as the most dangerous time of any kidnapping situation), or during an attempted rescue or escape (also highly dangerous). In short, if you survive the initial hostage-taking, you don’t attempt to escape, and nobody tries to rescue you by force, then your survival chances jump into well above 90% probability.

Yay!

Just be prepared for a wait. The average holding period prior to release for an expatriate aid worker is a little under 2 months. So be patient, wait it out, and keep your spirits up.

Also, do a hostage survival course.

Far more national staff are in the line of fire.

This is has always been a given, and this is why the average trend for expatriate v. national staff victims is relatively flat. There are simply a lot more national staff members on the ground than international ones, and therefore when something happens, they’re much more likely to be involved in the incident.

There’s some important reflection for agencies to do around this one, namely because inadvertently or deliberately, aid agencies manage the risks of national staff differently to expatriates. There is a good reason for this. Expatriates do generally have a higher risk profile than national staff (this may not be the case in some contexts, such as those involving ethnic or local political tensions). They cannot blend in, or disappear into a crowd if things go bad. They do not have the language skills to diffuse a tense situation. They have more economic value as a hostage and more political value as a target than nationals (depending on the context). Therefore there need to be more stringent risk management processes around expatriates in most contexts.

And on the flipside, dead national staff members are less damaging to the reputation of an organization than dead expatriates. The abduction and murder of CARE Iraq’s country director, Margaret Hassan, in 2004 was a high-profile media event and crisis for that organization. Ditto the kidnapping of the 2 MSF-Spain aid workers Montserrat Serra and Blanca Thiebaut from Dadaab in 2011 who were held for nearly 2 years, and in both cases would have required a massive organizational response and extensive damage-control. By contrast, while the murder by death-squad of 17 Sri Lankan ACF staff members in 2006 was a tragic event, and likewise the killing in a militant raid of 7 Pakistani World Vision staff members in 2010, neither event made a comparably big splash in the media, and neither had significant political, fundraising or profile consequences for the organizations in question (though I am confident that both events resulted in extensive internal changes to security management processes within those organizations).

As a result, we see the following:

National staff are more likely to be given clearance to travel into hostile environments, with the expectation that their risk profile is lower and they are better able to navigate the hazards (both statements often true, but they still end up exposed to risk)

Relative numbers of expatriate staff in the field are reducing. This is partly as a deliberate risk-management strategy, but also reflective of the increase in capacity of national staff members globally. Where many roles used to require expatriates to fill them, the number of field roles for expatriates in most large organizations is decreasing, as nationals are more and more capable to do the jobs, and do them for less than it costs to put an expatriate in that role. Note that this reduces risks to expatriate staff (who are not in harm’s way as a result), but can also reduce the overall risk to the national organization, as with fewer expatriates, the organization’s risk profile reduces, and its interest as a target goes down.

There is an increasing use of remote-operations in hostile environments. In places like Syria, Somalia and Iraq, agencies are less likely to put their own staff on the ground, and more likely to build a relationship with a pre-existing grass-roots NGO already operational in the field. They then channel programs, funding and resources into those partner agencies to do the work for them- which partly explains the big jump in both absolute and comparative numbers of LNGO and local RCRCS victims in the AWSD. This is known as ‘risk transfer’.

There is an increase in absolute terms in the number of local start-up NGOs. Similar to the previous point, with the increase in education, global connectivity and awareness in many less developed nations, locals have increasingly recognized the value in the NGO model to access and deliver assistance to needy local populations. As a result, there are far more spontaneous local NGOs appearing in hot-spots around the world, exposing more and more locals to security risks. Not only are these local personnel often directly implicated in crises (see for example many of the community-based organizations that operate in Syria, who will be identified by belligerents as being on one side or the other and therefore as potential targets), but these LNGOs rarely have the resources or the skills base to invest in significant security risk management for their staff and operations.

Expatriates are more likely to receive security training. Partly because of the higher individual risk profiles of expatriate staff, and the very high cost per capita of providing security training to personnel, most large agencies have prioritized training up their senior managers and deployable expatriate staff in hostile environment survival and risk management. The result is that many field-level staff in hostile environments have little or no security training, and as such may be engaged in more risky behaviour. This is something that is increasingly acknowledged by aid agencies, and programs are beginning to be put in place to rectify this, but it is a slow process. Training 10,000 national staff globally for a large organization takes a lot of time and a lot of precious donor funding in an environment where agencies are being given less and less. For small agencies, it can be a financial impossibility.

For reasons already discussed- their perceived political and economic value, their lack of awareness around local risk contexts, their inability to blend or disappear- expatriates do still face a higher risk profile when compared to their local counterparts. In short- they are more likely to be targeted by a belligerent.

Although on the surface this may not appear to be borne out by the accompanying statistics, it very much is. While 2013, for example, saw just 13% of victims being expatriates, recall that there are far fewer expatriates relative to national staff in the field. Even your typical large NGO program with 100 or so local staff might only have 5 to 8 expatriates. In some cases (e.g. Ethiopia, where expatriate numbers are strictly controlled), the ratio can be far lower- just 2 or 3 expatriates for several hundred staff. Many LNGOs- whose ranks increasingly populate the statistics- have no expatriates in the field at all. The AWSD estimates that expatriates are at least twice as likely to be targeted as national staff.

This does make developing a balanced risk management strategy challenging, and ultimately, agencies need to decide where their thresholds of acceptable risk lie, how critical their programs on the ground are to the populations they are supporting, and therefore the extent to which they are willing to place their staff at risk.

The majority of security incidents occur in a handful of global hotspots.

This goes without saying, really. There’s a reason nobody books vacations to Syria or Mogadishu- because we well understand that bad things regularly happen in these places, and going there puts us at unnecessary risk. The same is true of aid workers.

For example, in 2012, of 170 incidents, fully 130 took place in just 5 nations- Afghanistan (56), South Sudan (21), Syria (18), Somalia (17) and Pakistan (17). (Note that in relative terms, the rate of attack against aid workers was highest during this period in Somalia, as there are vastly fewer aid workers inside Somalia than inside Afghanistan and other locations). This dynamic is pretty easy to interpret looking at global and humanitarian news headlines. As an aid worker, if you’re in one of these places (this last twelve months, other security hotspots include Nigeria, Iraq and Gaza), your proportional probability of being involved in an incident is dramatically increased.

In addition, you can cross-reference this against the most deadly belligerent groups. For example, in IntelCenter’s latest analysis, Boko Haram has revealed itself as the most deadly terrorist group so far this year, with nearly 3,000 attributable killings since the start of 2014 (not, obviously, restricted to aid workers). The Islamic State comes in second place, while other groups with an honourable mention include the al-Nusrah Front, AQAP, al Shabaab and the Taliban. Again, no real surprises here if you follow security trends. As always, good security management tends to begin and end with common sense. But when you map these groups, global hotspots, and areas where aid workers operate, you immediately get a very skewed focus as to where real investment in aid worker security needs to begin.

When it comes to expatriates, your veteran EAWs are more likely to be involved in a serious security incident.

This is a very simplified and anecdotal descriptor, but there’s a key learning here. The sort of aid worker most likely to be involved in a major security incident is not your excited, idealistic newbie sent off on her first overseas assignment from head office. Why not? Well, because she’s far more likely to be aware of her own limitations, will probably be taking risk advice (like curfews & no-go areas) seriously, and is less likely to be placed into a highly threatening environment. If she’s just arrived in country, her senses will be up and therefore her situational awareness more likely to be running high. Frankly, she’s probably going to be a little edgy- as is the norm when you first arrive somewhere unfamiliar. It’s a basic human reaction.

By contrast, the primary at-risk descriptor here (which I know goes a long way to capturing a number of readers of this blog, and this author hits quite a few of the criteria too) is probably 10 or more years into their aid worker career, have done three or four long-term assignments overseas, and are several months into their current posting. They tend to have a been-there, done-that attitude, which means they will- deliberately or inadvertently- expose themselves to more risks. They are more likely to be deployed to a hostile environment. After the first few months, they’ve settled into a routine and have lost the initial awareness and heightened focus that comes with being in a new environment. And they’re more likely to settle into a ‘nothing’s happened so far, so I’m not really expecting anything to happen now’ mindset.

In short, it’s not just the inexperienced young expatriate staff that agencies need to concentrate on, but critically, the experienced, somewhat-jaded older hands who are moving into the peak of their humanitarian careers.

***

The sad reality is, any UN, Red Cross or NGO response necessarily requires placing staff at ever-increasing risk these days, and that much is borne out very clearly in the accompanying statistics. The absolute number of attacks, the number of victims, and particularly, the drastic increase in the kidnapping threat, means that being an aid worker- national or expatriate- in many of the world’s hotspots is dangerous business.

For any agency that operates in hostile environments- UN, INGO, LNGO, IFRC or RCRCS- security has to be a central component of operational budgets (donors, please take note), and putting in place a robust, well-informed security strategy is critical for every country office. Management staff need to be trained up in risk management processes, clear security SOPs need developing, a skilled and experienced cadre of security staff need to be employed to support response capability, and field staff need to be trained in basic survival procedures.

Even with all these things in place, sooner or later, chances are most large agencies will face one or more major security incidents, so they must be drilled in critical risk management and containment procedures. It’s sadly so commonplace as to be almost inevitable. But with good processes in place, the chances can be reduced, the impact minimized, and, hopefully, lives spared.

Or: How the UN Would Struggle to Consensus-Manage its Way out of a Paper Bag with a Map and an Oxyacetylene Torch

Ah this old egg.

Every now and again, I see comments pop up from certain friends or connections of mine, or in slivers of mainstream media, to the tune of “The United Nations is preparing to take over the United States of America”, or “The UN is slowly eroding United States sovereignty.”

It’s not a new thing. As far as I can tell, there’s been conspiracy theories (and yes, they are conspiracy theories- please read on) about the UN quietly establishing a New World Order and preparing to Take Over All Teh Countreez, for at least a couple of decades now. There’s some interpretations of the Book of Revelations in the Bible that indicate a world leader will arise and become the Anti-Christ, and people think the UN is that mechanism. This was drilled home by the improbably-popular ‘Left Behind’ series of apocalyptic fiction, in which a charismatic UN Secretary General becomes the powerful leader of a one-world army leading the forces of evil and hypnotising people. And stuff.

And other coherent arguments.

Needless to say, anybody with a knowledge of the UN and how it works can see that this is a foundless fear to the point of ludicrousy.

Those of us who have had the joy of sitting through UN-led meetings can attest to this with a degree of acute suffering set aside for people for whom karma must have a deep debt to settle.

Now, before I go any further, I need to say that while I may have some snarky things to say about UN systems and institutions individually, I have the utmost respect for the institution of the United Nations overall, in spite of its flaws. I also have deep respect for many of the professionals who work within the various UN agencies around the world, many of whom are consumate professionals passionate about trying to make the world a better place, and many of whom are close colleagues and friends of mine of whom I am very fond. This post is not meant to disparage any of them, or their work.

Also, a big shout-out to the lovely folks who run the Humanitarian Response Fund, the Central Emergency Response Fund, and our partners in the contracts divisions of UNICEF, UNHCR and WFP. Did I mention lately how much we like you guys? Also, about that quarterly report…

1. The UN is Not a Para-State Actor

The structure of the United Nations is not that of a para-state actor. What does that mean? It means the UN isn’t a separate country, with an economy and a military and a judiciary and an executive branch and territory and so forth. It is not a system of government.

The UN is, at its core, a coordinating organization. In crude terms, it provides a forum for all the countries of the world to come together and agree on stuff, in order to limit how often they get into fights with each other.

It has sub-organizations that then provide sub-forums to facilitate and support action in particular sectors. For example, the Worl d Health Organization facilitates research into aspects of public health, promotes strategies and courses of action to manage health issues, and works to strengthen individual nations’ Ministries of Health to improve the health of those nations. Individual nations choose to opt into the various programs that WHO (pronounced ‘double-you ayche oh’, not ‘The Who’, which is a rock band from the sixties, for the love of all that is holy please get this right) puts together, on an entirely voluntary basis, each working bilaterally with WHO on those aspects of health management which are relevant and for which there is budget.

Not this.

The same is true of countless other UN programs. UNESCO works to support nations in protecting their cultural heritage. The International Court of Justice provides a forum for trying to resolve certain aspects of international law that exceed the jurisdiction of individual nations and where those nations’ laws might be at odds. The International Labour Office creates guidelines around what fair labour practices should look like around the world in discussion with state representatives, and then encourages nations to adopt them, or provides advice on how best to reform their labour sector.

None of these organizations dictates policy to any sovereign nation. They have no power to do-so, nor a mandate. They simply provide the forum for common agreements to be reached between member states, then encourage the implementation of these agreements. The World Health Organization has no authority over any Ministry of Health. It cannot implement a single national-level policy or decision in a single state anywhere in the world. It is completely up to the individual member state to choose to implement (or not) a policy recommendation from the UN.

Understand that each of these organizations that make up the UN are staffed not by some shadowy cadre of placeless, stateless minions operating in some bubble of UN territory deep underground to create policies by which the world might be run. Every UN staff member is recruited from various member states of the UN, based on a policy that aims to ensure a representation of the various countries of the world based on their contributions to the overall UN system. The UN is staffed by people from Germany and India and Swaziland and Britain and Papua New Guinea and 188 other sovereign states. And because the US gives more to the UN than anybody else (debt notwithstanding), it is particularly heavily represented in UN staffing cadres. These people are professionals, technical experts, politicians- many of them formerly civil servants from their own governments before working for the UN.

Who did you think was really drafting all those policies?

In addition, each member state appoints representatives to the UN General Assembly. These people- unlike many people employed in UN agencies, who are paid employees- are appointed representatives of their government to the UN. For major decisions in coordinating between member states, the people who are making these decisions are not, again, the sinister elite of some huge organization that is quietly sucking all the power out of the world. They are employees of the separate and disparate state governments who make up the UN, paid by their respective governments and held accountable not to any UN policy or edict or the UN Secretary General, but to the policies of their own executive branch and foreign affairs line ministry.

So if the UN is up to anything, it’s doing it with the full support and engagement not of some ficticious United Nations leadership committee, but with the knowledge and participation of member states in line with their government policies reflected accordingly. And that includes US State Department diplomats accountable to the usual systems, checks, balances and accountabilities of the US Government’s judiciary, legislature and executive.

Oh the intrigue.

2. The UN has No Power At All to Enforce Anything

Let’s really drill this home. The UN has pretty much no power. It has no authority or line-management with a single state institution. It cannot, cannot, did I mention cannot make a single nation or head of state do anything.

Let’s take a treaty. For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It’s a broad document that captures a set of statements and ideals that reflect how the various member states feel children should be protected under their individual nations’ laws. For example, it influences the age at which a child should be considered an adult, the age at which a child is allowed to vote, the age at which a child can serve in the military or be tried as an adult, or the laws that protect a child from being forced to work. It enshrines the rights of children to play, to have an education, to be with their families, and so forth.

All nations in the world save one (South Sudan, which has been a nation for less than 2 years) have signed up to it. People like kids, and most good people feel kids should be protected. It’s a good thing.

Of course, when a nation signs a treaty, they then need to ratify it. Ratifying is writing the principles of the treaty into the legislation of their own country. So, for example, they have written into law that a child must be 18 years old before they can work at a particular level, and that there are penalties for employers breaking this law.

And of course, even once a treaty has been ratified into law, the country must then enforce those laws. There are a number of countries that have signed the convention on the rights of the child, written into law that children cannot marry before the age of 16, but do nothing to prevent child marriage or convict those who practice it.

The UN cannot make any member state sign a treaty.

The UN cannot make any member state that has signed a treaty ratify that treaty into law.

And the UN cannot make any country enforce those laws even if they have been written into legislation.

Do you really think that most UN representatives (or global governments, for that matter) think it’s a good thing that a 40-year-old man can marry and have sex with an eight-year-old girl in Yemen? Pretty much every country would have that man in prison on charges of paedophilia. But does the UN do anything to Yemen on this front, even though such activity is against the UN-backed convention on the rights of the child, and Yemen has not just signed but also ratified that treaty? It does not, because it has no such power or authority. And recall that Yemen is one of the weaker member states of the UN.

I was going to put a photo of a child bride and a wisecrack here, but opted for this fluffy bunny instead.

Note that the US is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child but has not ratified it- one of only two nations globally. This is because in the US, minors can serve in the armed forces from the age of 16 (if you include military training), and because the US allows some minors to be tried as and face the same sentences as an adult. The US government is not willing to change its practices in this regards, and claims that it has adequate protections already written into law around other aspects of the convention to protect children, so ratifying the treaty is not necessry.

Whatever the perspective on this position, one thing is very clear. The US has never faced any fallout in terms of its sovereignty with regards to this treaty. It has suffered no repurcussions. The UN cannot force the US government to do a thing.

And then this happens.

3. The UN can take No Unilateral Action without Agreement from Member States

The UN has no direct control over any member state. The UN does have a few options up its sleeve to encourage, influence or impress decisions however. If diplomacy on a critical issue fails, it can apply economic sanctions on a country, in a variety of fashions that may limit certain kinds of imports and exports (see Iraqi oil under Saddam Hussein), or target certain members of national leadership by freezing international assets or disallowing international travel. It can also mandate an international intervention force which will go in with a range of possible responses under it (more on this below).

Regardless of the effectiveness of some of these measures (also see below), the UN cannot implement any of these measures without the approval of the majority of member states.

In fact, just getting to this stage takes weeks, months, sometimes years of diplomacy, conversation, meetings, working groups, recommendations, redrafts and general bureaucratic hamsterwheeling.

I’m not going to explain the sanctions approval process here, because I don’t know it in any depth myself. I do know there are committees, that many (all?) UN sanctions have to go through a security council sanctions committee of some description, and that some (all?) sanctions or actions also go through the UN General Assembly.

In short, there are checks and balances. Horrible, horribly bureaucracy. Bureaucracy that would bore a sloth. And, like everything else the UN does, decisions are not necessarily enforceable. For example, the UN can place sanctions on a particular country, but it is then up to the other member states of the UN to actually put that into action. The UN Security Council can decide to place export sanctions on Iran, for example, but other nations, if they choose to, can still trade with Iran. Travel restrictions were placed on Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir after the ICC issued a war-crimes arrest warrant for him, but he still travelled to Kenya (ostensibly a nation signatory to the ICC, although that’s another topic of conversation after its recent elections), and Kenya allowed the visit to continue without any fallout.

This is even truer for any military action the UN sanctions. For military action to go ahead, it must first be agreed upon by the UN Security Council, which has 5 permanent members and 10 temporary members drawn on a rotation basis from the other 188 member states. The 5 permanent members- the US, Britain, France, Russia and China- all have veto power, which means if just one of them disagrees with a recommended action to the security council (including sanctions, diplomatic action, military intervention) then they can simply vote ‘no’ and the action cannot proceed.

So again, with the US government being permanently represented on the UN Security Council, there is no way the UN as an organization can do anything major that the US isn’t prepared to tolerate.

4. The UN has No Standing Army

This is where the talk of ‘UN forces’ gets a little silly. A bit like the whole Black Helicopter discussion. Only, you know, stealth helicopters and black paint both exist, so I’m sure somebody somewhere is using them. But probably not to keep tabs on what you buy at the local 7-11.

Let me say this clearly. The UN has no standing army. Zip. Nada. Aside from a few armed security guards who keep an eye on UN headquarters and the relatively small UN Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) which provides security assistance for UN programs, Ban Ki-Moon couldn’t rustle up a bouncer with a butter knife without the support of the member states.

Only if France says yes.

The UN doesn’t ‘deploy’ forces. The UN ‘sanctions’ them. That means, it gives them its blessing. It lets them use the Blue Helmets and take on the title of whichever UN-approved mission this happens to be.

Once the UN Security Council has approved a UN intervention force (not a common thing), it is then entirely reliant on various soveriegn states to provide the necessary personnel, vehicles, weapons systems, logistics support, funding- everything required to field a military force on the ground. This can take weeks, months, sometimes years to scale-up. It’s a labouriously slow process.

Once member states have chosen to allocate resources (usually quite patchwork and piecemeal), there is then a system of command and control that the UN coordinates via the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). However even within this, military units that have been ‘seconded’ into a peacekeeping operation still report primarily to their own government and military structure, and only after that to the DPKO. The giving nation can withdraw those forces at any time or countermand orders, and the contingent commander is under no ‘obligation’ to obey the DPKO command structure or Force Commander if their own state hierarchy deems it against their interest.

If you want to read about just how unwieldy a process UN peacekeeping interventions are, read Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. It will have you alternatively weeping, screaming at the technocrats involved, or wanting to hurl your book/Kindle across the room in frustration. Sheri Fink’s War Hospitalis similarly heart-wrenching.

5. UN Peacekeeping Forces are Not Staffed with Crack Military Operators

Or black helicopters.

For the most part, western government commit relatively little to actual peacekeeping operations these days. The bulk of front-line troops in forces such as MONUC (in the DRC) or UNAMID (Darfur) are from developing countries. This is because the UN essentially leases troops from state governments for a fee, and for some developing countries, this means their soldiers get paid more than the government could afford to pay them (or at least offsets the costs), and it is therefore profitable both financially and from the experience gained by these troops. Major contributers to peacekeeping forces include Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria, as examples.

Meanwhile the UK, the US and other western nations generally find it against their political interests to send troops to the front lines. No western politician wants to be responsible for troops dying in some war that isn’t directly related to them. They will provide logistics support, some equipment, maybe some technical expertise or high-level staffing. But usually to a limited budget, and often reluctantly. UN Peacekeeping missions typically take from months to well over a year to reach full force, and are often poorly equipped even at that time.

Most UN peacekeeping forces, for example, use old equipment. Cold-war era helicopters (Mi-8s are a mainstay)and armoured personnel carriers (M113s, which date back to the Vietnam War, and BTR-60s, a 1960s Soviet APC) are commonplace. Personnel deploy in soft-skinned Toyota Land Cruisers. Their hardware is light. As Dallaire notes, troops may deploy without even the basics, such as good uniforms or proper logistical support for things like food (at least as was the case in Rwanda in 1994- post Desert Storm when western nations had the capacity to field highly sophisticated military forces). More advanced systems may be deployed at times today, but not in large numbers. What’s certainly key to note is that no UN-mandated force is deploying with M1A2 main battle tanks, Stryker LAVs (for better or for worse), Apache Longbows and MLRS. The only time a UN-mandated force did deploy like this was Operation Desert Storm in 1991, during the campaign to liberate Kuwait, and the bulk of its force was provided by the US military.

Compared to the modern armies of most western nations, UN forces are undertrained, underprovisioned, with a light logistics tail, outdated equipment, and a fragile command and control element- not to mention lacking the sophisticated communications and intelligence services that also accompany modern military incursions.

Take for example the UN force in the DRC (MONUC). It was first sanctioned nearly 14 years ago in 1999, with one of the most robust peacekeeping mandates of any UN operation. It’s still there. It hasn’t defeated the various rebel militias operating in east DRC. Civilians are still at major risk. I don’t want to denegrate the soldiers who risk their lives as part of that operation. But, due in part to the experience of the troops, the quality of their weapons and support, the funding, the management, and their Rules of Engagement, this is not a shining example of a highly effective fighting force.

A more damning report again comes from a reading of Shake Hands, in which General Dallaire’s request for a relatively small force increment was assessed as sufficient to prevent the genocide that claimed 800,000 lives in Rwanda 19 years ago, but was never approved.

In relation to the concerns this article responds to, the UN lacks first the organizational ability to carry out any operations against the US (because a US government representative sits on the UN Security Council and only needs to say ‘no’ to stop the UN bureaucracy from allowing it to happen), and second the military capability to take on a powerful western military force like that of the United States.

Sure, you could conceive of a future scenario whereby certain world powers conspired an alliance to attack the US. Why not? Go for it. China, Russia, India, maybe even the French, right? All band together to form a global super-army and have a crack at it? I [used to] read Clancy [before he got crap *cough*RainbowSix*cough*] too. But, see, that has nothing to do with the UN. That’s just a bunch of countries agreeing something together. Different story altogether.

The UN? Never going to happen.

6. The United Nations Secretary General is not a Warlord

Let’s ignore, for a moment, the pragmatic reality that the only reason the current UNSG’s own home nation is not overrun by a horde of crazy-eyed and very confused North Korean soldiers each month is due to the strong US military support to South Korea. Ban Ki-Moon has no plans for world domination. Nor did Kofi Annan before him (Ghana has never really positioned itself on the stage of world superpowers like that), and nor did Boutros-Boutros Ghali before him.

In fact, in more than 65 years of its existence, no UN Secretary General has attempted- or even exhibited behaviour towards- world domination. There has been no significant changes in the level of power or authority that the UN has. The UN’s various charters, treaties, edicts and so forth have grown deeper and more complex, like a colony of spiders on speed, but they haven’t actually increased the UN’s pragmatic power at all.

The UN Secretary General is a technocrat who operates within the confines of a massive bureaucracy. One so complex and unwieldy it makes France’s look like a trip to the box office to buy a cinema ticket. There are rules, regulations, policies. It’s about as sinister as a stale sandwich.

Why- why- would the UN want to take over the United States? And do you really think a figurehead of a diplomat like Mr. Ban could actually run it?

I have nothing against the UNSG. Nothing particular to say in favour of the man, either. I’m sure he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances. But the reality is that the UNSG’s job is, I imagine, pretty frustrating. He’s a deal-broker, perhaps- somebody who works to find a compromise between disagreeing parties that generally leaves both parties accepting an outcome that neither are fully satisfied with. He has his eyes on a relatively small portfolio of high-level international affairs, gives the occasional speech, smiles for the photo opportunities. Behind the scenes, he may be (I presume is) a skilled negotiator, schmoozer and general agent for keeping things calm and friendly between nations who’d like to park a few warhead on each others’ front lawns. But a power-hungry closet-commy Anti-Christ with designs on the White House? Umm, no.

Although…

7. The UN has Checks and Balances- like any other Government

In fact, more checks than you would believe. So much red tape it can be almost impossible to get anything done. And trust me, at times I’ve tried- admittedly from outside the system, but colleagues who work inside it profess the same thing. Every country office of every UN agency has its own way of doing things. An agreement with UNICEF in DRC may be won in a completely different manner to one in Chad due to the personalities involved and the way systems are applied. What WFP might agree to, UNHCR won’t.

There are councils, steering committees, working groups. Administration out the wazoo. You have seriously not see bureaucracy until you have worked closely with the UN. I know contractors who have waited a year and a half for their payslip to come through. Some of the most nonsensical policies and approaches you’ll ever come across. If the UN is out to destroy the world, it’s not through any malicious design, but through the sheer weight of administrative burden that will collapse in on itself like a black hole and consume creation.

As I mentioned above, the UN has no real power. There are layers and layers of permissions and protocols to go through before any action is approved and sanctioned, and at every step, buy-in from member states is needed to actually achieve anything, and then those member-states must do the implementing. These checks and balances mean that, far from being a threat to society, the UN’s biggest threat is becoming useless and irrelevant. The UN Security Council is an anachronistic hangover from the end of the Second World War, when the five nuclear powers responsible for carving up what was left of Eurasia needed a forum to ensure that nuclear war didn’t start through some unfortunate misunderstanding among themselves. A reform of the UNSC has been discussed for years, but understandably, none of the permanent member states really want to give up their seat of control- even though there are now another half-dozen nuclear powers (at least) kicking around the table.

Getting the US, the UK, France, Russia and China to agree on anything is such a daunting task that if there’s anything to be gleaned here, it’s that the fact the UN can make even the smallest task happen is in itself a miracle worth celebrating.

These checks and balances tend the UN not towards a radical sweep to global power and evil mayhem, but towards overwhelming inertia. This is no dark organization poised to take over the world. This is a bumbling bureaucracy that shuffles forward towards a distant goal with dogged, if painstaking, determination.

*

A quick aside for Christians. There’s a prevailing mythology propagated in many churches that the UN is the Anti-Christ- or at least its precursor. This is based on certain readings of the book of Revelation which symbolically suggest a powerful supernatural ruler rising up to dominate many nations. This is unfortunate, because the book of Revelation is, for the Christian, a fascinating and exciting book whose value should be read first as a critique of the contemporary church (contemporary to John, who wrote it, with many applications to the church contemporary to us that should be addressed) and not a roadmap to the future. The Bible is very clear when it comes to the notion of the ‘end times’, that “no one shall know the day”. The modern church seems to have missed the lesson learned from the Old Testament, in which countless prophecies related to the Messiah, and yet none of the established teachers at the time accurately interpreted what the Messiah would look like when he finally came- to the point that contemporary religious leaders rejected Jesus almost completely.

If that’s the case, why on earth would we put our confidence in mainstream hack theology, propounded via New York Times bestseller lists, that the most accurate interpretation of the future and the coming end-times is that the UN is the Anti-Christ?

Plus those Left Behind books were horribly and unimaginatively written. Trust me. I read the first seven before giving up.

What if it was on the NYT Bestsellers list AND Oprah endorsed it?

If scripture tells us anything, it tells us not to focus on interpreting the future, but to look at the present. Be vigilant. Don’t be silly.

It’s also a shame, because the work the UN and its subsiduary agencies do, while flawed and frequently manipulated, is often very much in line with the teachings of Jesus and other parts of scripture- reaching out on a global scale to feed the hungry, provide material assistance to the poor, resolve injustice, and encourage peaceful dialogue instead of war. Essentially, the United Nations creates the ability for various nation states with disagreements to meet together on neutral ground and resolve their differences, and come up with ways of improving things for the future.

It’s far from perfect; trust me, I’ve watched the UN system at work for much of my life. But in as much as the world is a pretty messy place, it’s doing okay considering.

*

It’s not the UN that’s out to control people. It’s fear. Fear is acknowledged as the strongest motivator in the human psyche. It’s irrational (see all of the above) and because it’s linked to the survival instinct, if it can be manipulated, it’s highly lucrative. The NRA has a powerful platform that sells billions of dollars worth of guns by making people feel afraid of what’s around them. Diet, exercise and health fads channel huge amounts of money into the pockets of their advocates, making people frightened of ill health and early death. Governments justify international wars by painting their enemies as an imminent threat, and therefore bringing their populations onside.

When listening to messages that invoke fear, try and look at them critically. Who’s bringing this message? What do they have to gain by bringing it? Is it really founded on an empirical reality, or is it just words that are easy to put out there? If I viewed the same issue from somebody else’s perspective, would it still look the same?

With a knowledge of UN systems and bureaucracy, the suggestion that the United Nations poses a threat to the sovereignty of the United States is just laughable. The UN has no such mandate. Its checks and balances, which are many, have input from representatives of the US government. It has no authority or power to actually enforce any of its treaties, edicts or policies, on any state. Any punitive action it does take can only be carried out with the compliance of other UN member states, and implemented by those states. It has no standing army, and when it does coordinate a military operation via the DPKO, those military units are still in final obeisance to their own state governments, not the UN. Those military units tend to be poorly trained, understaffed and undersupplied, and would be no match for the US military. Ultimately, though, the UN is not a nation state. It controls no territory and has no government. It doesn’t work in the same way a government does, and therefore the idea that the UN would be trying to seize control of the world doesn’t have any merit whatsoever.

The United Nations is simply a coordinating body that exists to capture and facilitate the collective will of its 193 member states, imperfectly and skewed in favour of the wealthier and more powerful nations, and specifically, the five permanent security-council members.

The humanitarian industry is a relatively new one in its current form. This makes it an interesting, frequently exciting one to be involved with, as it’s constantly changing. This can be a challenge, too.

I like to joke that the earliest disaster preparedness and response on record is Noah’s Ark. Then of course there’s the story of Joseph (he of Technicolour Dreamcoat ™ fame), who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams of skinny cattle devouring fat cattle as an impending famine and subsequently requisitioned harvest surplus which he then redistributed to the hungry when said famine eventuated.

Humanitarianism as we know it today has, for better or for worse, become an industry, and has developed quickly from a relatively fringe activity best left to hippies and missionaries, to a multi-billion-dollar a year sector attracting a wide range of skilled and experienced professionals. It’s unique, dynamic and, certainly from an insider’s perspective, fascinating. But the way things look today haven’t popped out of nowhere. Over the last century and a half, the humanitarian industry has been shaped by a number of key events and moments that have given rise to its current dynamics.

1. The Battle of Solferino (June 24th 1859)

At the height of the Austro-Sardinian war, a Swiss businessman by the name of Jean-Henri Dunant travelled to the small Italian town of Solferino, where he witnessed the aftermath of a battle that left forty thousands dead and wounded. So struck was he by the plight of the casualties, many of whom were abandoned and left to die, or executed by the enemy, that he forewent his business plans and spent the ensuing days helping to organize medical care for the survivors.

The experience so moved him that upon returning to Geneva, he wrote up his memories, recommending the establishment of a movement of trained and neutral volunteers who could administer medical aid to the casualties of battle, and treaties offering such people protection. His recommendations became the foundation for what was to become the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as the first Geneva Conventions.

The Committee’s proposals, initially signed and endorsed by 12 nations in 1864, recognized the need for national committees of volunteers to provide medical assistance on the battlefield, but also enshrined the neutrality of wounded soldiers. The agreed international symbol, as laid out by the signed agreements, was a red cross on a white field- the inversion of the Swiss flag, itself a symbol of neutrality.

This notion of neutrality, and of non-combattants offering non-partisan support to the injured victims of warfare, became the founding tenet of modern humanitarian organizations, and the ICRC continues to this day to occupy a unique status under International Humanitarian Law and within the rules of warfighting. The Red Cross Code of Conduct forms the guiding set of 10 principles that most major NGOs voluntarily adopt as their core values, particularly enshrining the primacy of the humanitarian imperative, neutrality and impartiality.

2. The Aftermath of World War II and the Marshall Plan (1945, 1948-51)

Following the victory of the allied forces first in the European theatre, and subsequently in Asia, most of Europe in 1945 had been devastated. The extent of destruction caused by warfare and bombardment, the loss of millions of men at the peak of their economic productivity, and the diversion of years’ worth of resources into the machinery of war, meant that both society and economy across the continent was decimated.

Conversely, because it had stimulated its economy through the production of wartime assets without suffering any destruction of its mainland infrastructure, the USA had become the first country in history to economically thrive under conditions of warfare (a dynamic that has echoes today in how the economy operates while America is at war). In order to shore up its wartime allies, to assist with the vast humanitarian needs of post-war Europe, and no doubt to maintain the health of its key trading partners, Harry Truman’s government put together an economic recovery package of unprecedented proportions. It would see some USD 13 billion invested across western Europe.

Whether due to the plan itself, or due to the simple mechanics of post-war recovery, industrial output did increase substantially during the plan’s lifetime, and was deemed in many corners to have been a great success. The Marshall Plan laid out a framework for international foreign assistance that became increasingly the norm, with large bilateral or multilateral grants or loans provided to countries with struggling economies in order to lift their productivity and stability.

As well as normalizing the concept of foreign assistance on such a large scale, another interesting side-effect of such a large humanitarian crisis was the need to have capacity to deliver support, and so the US government agreed to allow private charitable organizations provide emergency relief to war survivors. Although the charity was not a new concept, this gave new impetus to non-governmental relief agencies, and many of today’s largest NGOs appeared around this time. CARE, which is an acronym for “Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere”, in fact originally stood for “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe”.

A third impact of the end of the Second World War was of course the founding of the United Nations (UN), to replace the defunct League of Nations that had failed so miserably to prevent World War II in the first place. This occured in 1945. As well as spawning a host of international agreements on everything from trade to human rights, the UN also gave birth to a spread of sub-organizations with specific mandates. Among the most pressing in the post-war years was the plight of the tens of millions of refugees forced from their home in the fighting- and thus was born the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1947, which three years later became the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the most dynamic and critical international organizations in the humanitarian field today.

3. The Biafran Airlift (1967-70)

In 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria following a series of coups, counter-coups and ethnic killings, and the ethnic Igbo in the south of the country declared their own homeland, the state of Biafra. The Nigerian government responded by blockading Biafra, and a humanitarian crisis resulted, with millions of civilians caught up without food and medical supplies.

In response, a huge humanitarian operation was launched, and a mix of well-meaning volunteers and mercenaries, funded by charity organizations, began flying food and medical supplies into Biafra. The mission was fraught with danger- the Nigerian airforce would shoot down any relief flights claiming (most likely accurately) that weapons were being smuggled to the resistance. Flights were flown in at night, without lights, and landings orchestrated on roads in the bush where supplies could then be delivered to starving civilians.

By war’s end as many as three million people may have died, mostly due to a mixture of starvation and disease. The involvement of humanitarian actors, however, has subsequently been condemned. Not only did the relief flights facilitate the smuggling of weapons to the Biafran rebels, but some critics claimed that the relief assistance merely gave the Biafrans the resolve to hold out longer, exacerbating the humanitarian situation rather than surrendering and allowing the seige to end. One report put the toll due to humanitarian action at 180,000 dead. This was the largest and most high-profile instance to that point of humanitarian intervention being arguably partisan, and also contributing significant harm, not just good.

Another important cameo played out in the Biafran civil war. Red Cross workers were allowed to work in the war-affected areas to provide medical assistance, but under the guise of neutrality were not allowed to speak about what they were seeing. Witnessing atrocities against civilians committed by government forces, as well as attacks against humanitarian staff, this enraged some of the volunteers. Most prominent among these was Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, who felt strongly that the Red Cross’s stance on neutrality was an ethical compromise. He determined to establish an organization that was free of any government influence and could speak out on behalf of those affected by crisis, and the NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was born. MSF remains one of the foremost NGOs to this day, and is fiercely independant and proud (to a fault…?) of its independence from government, military and even international organizational influence. The actions of Kouchner and his peers also set a precedent for relief agencies advocating on behalf of the rights of the victims of conflict and injustice, not simply being silent responders.

Biafra introduced a whole new complexity to the idea of ‘neutral’ aid agencies on several fronts.

4. The Ethiopia Famine (1983-5) and Live Aid (1985)

From 1983, a combination of failed rains, civil warfare and the purges and collectivist policies of a communist dictatorship had pushed Ethiopia into one of the worst famines of the 20th century. By its end, 8 million people would be affected by famine, with between 500,000 and one million deaths. Images of its victims, made famous by BBC reporter Michael Buerke’s dispatches from the field, were broadcast onto TV screens across the western world, making the Ethiopian famine the first to really be witnessed by a western audience.

Galvanized by public sympathy, a group of some of the most popular musicians of the day joined together, led by the enthusiastic Bob Geldof, to form Band Aid. They recording a song to raise funds for Ethiopian famine victims, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ which became a Christmas Number One in the UK charts in late 1984. In 1985, Geldof again coordinated efforts for a fundraising concert, held simultaneously in the UK and the US, which ultimately garnered an audience of a little under 2 billion people worldwide and raised an estimated $150 million.

The Ethiopian famine and the subsequent fundraising efforts marked a watershed moment in the history of aid fundraising. Large amounts of fundraising money were no longer just the domain of governments, nor were charities restricted to small pockets of whatever they could raise through collection baskets and faithful donors. Furthermore, the idea of a world out there- the third world- experiencing hardship was suddenly projected into peoples’ homes and made a part of their day-to-day consciousness. Since that time, people- particularly in the west- have remained aware of third world disasters. It is part of the collective experience and expectation that there is a poor world out there that suffers things that people in the west do not tend to.

On the up side, this has made the job of convincing people of the need to give easier. There is also a downside. Since Live Aid and many of the confronting images that were broadcast to shock people into giving, people have slowly become increasingly desensitized to images of suffering. The awareness-raising and media campaigns for the Ethiopia famine also represented the major incursion of shocking images into the public space, to the detriment of the dignity of survivors which has taken years to break down (and is still a challenge in some sectors).

5. The Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2004) and Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS)

The civil war between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) ultimately resulted in two million deaths and four million refugees. Africa’s longest-running civil war, and possibly the most destructive, it too resulted in devastating images of famine as population groups were forced from their homes to settle in large, unsanitary camps where food supplies were precarious and disease rampant.

The international community established Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a consortium of UN agencies and three dozen NGOs, in 1989, with the aim of delivering assistance to the mainly southern displaced people in camps both within and outside Sudan itself. A logistics airhead was set up in the small Turkana town of Lokichoggio, in Kenya, from which a vast operation of airdrops and relief deliveries was flown into Sudan. At the height of operations, Loki was the second busiest airport in Africa. OLS remains functional today, although not to the extent it was through the 1990s.

The civil war in Sudan was in part a proxy of the Cold War, and as such western allegiences found themselves favouring the southern rebels, both in terms of ideology and in terms of potential access to oil and mineral revenues in the long run. This was reflected in the huge amounts of funding that were invested in OLS, enabling such a massive aerial logistics operation. The offshoot of this was the explosion in budget of many of the NGOs party to OLS, catapulting some of them into the massive organizations they are today.

OLS also became an unwitting party to the conflict. Food aid became a weapon in the war on the ground, and was used to tactical advantage by both sides. By feeding humanitarian information to OLS, belligerents could influence where food drops were headed, and because populations would move to where the food was, they could thus influence the movement of people to their advantage in the field. It was an ugly ploy that cost the lives of thousands.

OLS’ involvement in the Sudanese civil war was a turning point in the humanitarian industry. As it became clear that the impact of food aid was having a detrimental effect on the people it was supposed to be helping, it began to become clear to the aid industry as a whole that they could no longer act out of the right motivations and still be operating with a clear conscience. The aid industry could no longer feign innocence- it was clearly becoming complicit in the conflict- and nowhere has this been more obviously demonstrated than in the Sudan civil war, and the ultimate secession of South Sudan as a state. With the humanitarian sector essentially propping up the southern government- even to this day- there is little doubt that South Sudan is a state that was created by the intervention of humanitarian actors. I have not seen any studies that suggest what the humanitarian impact might have been without OLS intervention, but I wonder whether the war would have lasted as long or cost as many lives, and I am utterly convinced that, for better or for worse, South Sudan would not be a state today.

The high profile of OLS, particularly the drama of large-scale airdrops, also had the unfortunate side-effect of cementing in the donor public’s mind that this was what aid was about- truck-and-chuck. It’s an assumption that twenty years on, the aid industry still struggles to re-educate the public about, making it hard to raise funds for other less appealing but often far more relevant issues such as human rights, advocacy and institutional capacity-building.

6. The Rwandan Genocide (April-July 1994)

During a hundred day period in mid-1994, Hutu extremists slaughtered over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a calculated, cruel campaign of extermination. Based on old ethnic tensions, a history of tit-for-tat killing sprees, a hate-fueled propaganda message, and the meddling and inaction of international powers, the Rwandan genocide remains one of the darkest stains on the concience of modern history.

The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, at the time a rebel army, swept across Rwanda and eventually brought the killing of Tutsis to something of a denouement. The Hutu extremists, together with nearly two million ethnic Hutus, fled ahead of the advancing front and found themselves in dire camps on the rocky lava flows of eastern Zaire. Unable to dig pit latrines, and living in deplorable conditions, cholera broke out and killed tens of thousands of the refugees in a matter of weeks.

While the international community had stalled and stalled again during the genocide, images of Africans dying by the thousands on TV screens now galvanized them to action, and millions of dollars worth of aid was flown into the Hutu camps around Goma- while survivors of the genocide were still receiving scant attention. As dollars flowed into the camps, the orchestrators of the genocide and their militias consolidated control over the population (and the aid resources), preventing the return of Hutus into Rwanda to begin a reconciliation process, and even launching attacks back into Rwanda (which the newly-installed Rwandan government returned with gusto). Eighteen years on, fighting continues to plague the forests of eastern DRC (as Zaire has since been renamed), with vicious slaughter of civilians and proliferation of horrific rape a daily occurence, while old scores are settled by both sides. The invasion of Goma by the Tutsi-backed M23 rebel group this week is the latest chapter in this story.

The failure of the international community to act to stop the genocide (something that could have been done with the right political will), and then the subsequent outpouring of international sympathy and support to the very purpotrators of that genocide- all in the name of impartiality and the primacy of the humanitarian imperative- remains the blackest spot on the history of the aid community. The concepts of neutrality, impartiality and humanitarian imperative all took a beating, and where at one time they might have been considered black-and-white standards, since Rwanda there has been a new appreciation for the shades of grey they embody.

The Rwandan genocide was one of three humanitarian interventions that went horribly wrong in the early 90s- the others being Somalia (1993) and the former Yugoslavia (1992-95). In the former, aid was appropriated by warlords and used as a weapon against a suffering populace, ultimately leading to a catastrophic peace-enforcing intervention. In the latter, UN forces with a sketchy mandate struggled to make sense of the deep-seated hatred of the belligerents, their biggest failure being the murder of 8,000 men and boys by Serb extremists in the beseiged muslim enclave of Srebrenica- even while a battalion of dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing.

The aftermath of these failed interventions gave rise to a whole new understanding of the complexity of aid and the potential for humanitarian assistance to be outright unethical. Approaches such as Do No Harm, which are mainstream today, were birthed from the Goma debacle, while standards such as the Sphere Project arose, in part to try and ensure that humanitarian actors were singing from the same songsheet and not tripping over each others’ toes.

In addition, the highly complex nature of operations following Rwanda began to make it clear that aid work was no longer just about well-meaning do-gooders with a social conscience. Humanitarian actors needed to be able to work within the highly complex contexts which aid found itself being delivered in- to be able to work both with the technical aspects, and also the political ones. Where up to and throughout the 1980s it was generally enough to have a heartbeat and a willingness to work in the field, the fallout from Rwanda, Somalia and Yugoslavia saw a push towards the ever-increasing professionalisation of the aid sector.

Ultimately, Rwanda served as a deeply humbling experience for the humanitarian industry. If nothing else, it robbed the industry of the moral high ground, and forced it to accept its place as a player within a political landscape, often to the detriment of the people it purports to support. No event before or since has communicated this message so clearly.

7. The Bombing of the Canal Hotel (August 19th 2003)

Following the September 11 attacks on US soil, the United States led a ‘coalition of the willing’ against alleged terrorist targets, first in Afghanistan from late 2001, and subsequently in Iraq from early 2003. While the aerial assaults and troop incursions quickly broke the conventional forces of both nations (where they existed), the result was a bitter and drawn-out insurgency overlaid on a highly complex set of tribal and sectarian divisions that has turned both nations into two of the most unstable places on earth today.

As coalition forces swept through different parts of each country, the UN and NGOs flooded in behind them to pick up the pieces- providing humanitarian assistance to areas that had been difficult for them to reach in prior times due to political and security restrictions. With pro-coalition governments in each nation ostensibly supporting the foreign presence, humanitarian space opened up rapidly, and was quickly filled by humanitarian actors.

The net effect of this to the anti-western belligerents- who saw the coalition invasion of their homelands as an occupation and who framed it as an attack on Islam- was to view (not entirely without cause) the presence of western aid workers as simply a second wave of the occupation. While the first was a military presence, the second was a cultural colonization that sought to unravel conservative social norms with western notions of human rights, gender equality, tolerance and so-forth. The humanitarians became the enemy.

On August 19th 2003, a truck bomber drove into the compound at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, based out of the Canal Hotel. 22 people were killed, mostly UN staff, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative to Iraq, whose office was allegedly specifically targeted. One hundred were wounded. The attack was claimed by al Qaeda in Iraq. It was followed a month later by another bombing at the same site, and then a month after that, by a coordinated series of bombings that also targeted the Red Cross compound, killing 12. When it became clear that the humanitarian industry was no longer considered neutral by the belligerents but was being specifically targeted, NGOs and the UN withdrew rapidly from Iraq and began remote operations, based mostly from Jordan.

While aid workers had suffered incidental attacks, particularly while carrying out operations in active conflict zones, and had even suffered occasional deliberate attacks (for example the killing of six Red Cross workers in Chechnya in 1996), this was the first time that the industry had been targeted by a high-level campaign sending such a clear message. It did not mark the end of such attacks, either. Among other subsequent high-profile deliberate targeting of aid workers include the murder of 5 MSF staff in Afghanistan in mid-2004, the abduction and execution of CARE’s Iraq program director Margaret Hassan in November 2004, and the murder by militias of 17 ACF workers in Sri Lanka in August 2006. Roughly two hundred aid workers a year are victims of violence while on operations.

The Canal Hotel Bombing essentially set a precedent that said the humanitarian industry was no longer a neutral, impartial body but a party to the conflict, and as such a legitimate target. The industry has not been the same since. Aid workers now go through intensive security training before deploying to insecure areas. Aid agencies are jumpy about pulling their staff from hostile situations. Where once an aid agency’s logo might have protected them from violence, there are many places in the world where it is now seen to be something that puts them at risk. Significant portions of NGO and UN aid budgets are now spent on security, and in some parts of the world, NGOs struggle to differentiate themselves from military actors and government contractors who are agents of foreign policy and do not hold to humanitarian principles. No single event in the last ten years has had a bigger impact on the landscape of humanitarian action in insecure environments than the August 2003 bombing.

8. The South Asian Tsunami (December 26th 2004)

Early in the morning on December 26th, an enourmous tectonic rupture beneath the Indian Ocean triggered an earthquake of magnitude 9.2, generating a gigantic tsunami. The wave struck the Indonesian region of Aceh first, where the wave height was estimated at as high as twenty metres coming ashore, before other devastating waves washed up against southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and eventually even the east coast of Africa. More than 230,000 people died and five million were impacted.

The event made the term ‘tsunami’ a household word as shocking images of destruction emerged on television sets and the toll grew almost hourly, almost defying belief. Western audiences, particularly struck by the devastation on the tourist beaches of southern Thailand, where thousands of European holiday-makers were among the casualties, poured sympathy and money into the subsequent relief response. Ultimately, $14 billion would be provided in international humanitarian assistance.

The public response to the disaster was unprecedented and overwhelming. NGOs quite literally received more money than they knew what to do with- and while one (MSF) publically closed its appeal once it had reached an amount it felt it could work with, most others continued to allow the funds to flow in, creating a massive surplus. The result was an organizational disaster as agencies tripped over themselves to try and spend their funds in a timely manner, squabbling over response sectors and geographical areas in order to stake out their territory and not dissapoint their donors. Many smaller NGOs popped up specifically in response to the tsunami with no knowledge of the humanitarian sector or its standards, and coordination across the board became at points nearly disfunctional.

The massive response to the tsunami- an admittedly enourmous natural disaster- occured against the backdrop of a number of other major world crises, particularly the war in Darfur, but also a devastating conflict in DRC, both of which were suffering from a paucity of international attention and funding. This frustration was exacerbated by the fact that the actual humanitarian needs following the tsunami were not as great as the scale of the event itself might suggest. While the death toll was high, the damage was limited to relatively narrow coastal areas, and the countries most affected (Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand), while overwhelmed, all had some national capacity to cope. Nor were the majority of survivors at the same level of risk as those in IDP camps in Dafur or eastern DRC.

This reality led NGOs into a period of considerable soul-searching, and the revamping of fundraising processes, particularly around the concept of raising too much money for a crisis that did not need the funding, and how that funding might be redirected. The issue of transparency around NGO spending became a prominent theme.
The single biggest criticism, however, remained that of coordination. Although the UN’s cluster system had begun to be piloted, the failures within the humanitarian community in this regard created a renewed impetus for focusing on collaboration. In the years following the tsunami, the UN’s Humanitarian Reform program has become mainstreamed, and coordination between major humanitarian actors is now the norm- if at times still flawed- in any significant humanitarian response, and the central role of UN OCHA is largely undisputed.

The vast amounts of money raised and the numbers of humanitarian actors involved did however create a prime testing ground for a number of cross-agency initiatives. Humanitarian accountability, for example, was piloted across a range of response programs, while the notion of interagency evaluations also gained traction. Existing humanitarian standards such as Sphere were given a rigorous outing, and found to be largely robust.

Other knock-on effects of the tsunami response relate particularly to donors. The disaster set a new precedent for a shocking event against which all other disasters would be measured. It demonstrated just how fickle western donors could be (not a new truth)- the outpouring of assistance was demonstrably linked to people’s identification with Thailand as a holiday spot. It also raised the issue of donor fatigue. So many people had given significant amounts to the tsunami response that it became difficult to fundraise for any other disasters, including areas of arguably greater need, such as Darfur.

9. The Haiti Earthquake (January 12th, 2010)

When a large (7.0) and shallow earthquake struck near Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, it was that city’s vulnerability rather than the enormity of the quake itself that resulted in the scale of catastrophe that ensued. Between two and three hundred thousand people died, as many more were injured, and a third of Haiti’s population affected. Against the backdrop of a fragile political and economic state with entrenched poverty, and the intensity of destruction within the city itself, the impact was devastating.

Because almost all major infrastructure in Port-au-Prince was damaged or destroyed, aid floundered reaching the survivors. Reporting on the disaster was fast. Within a couple of hours of the quake, it was headline news, and details were pouring out aided by social media. Within twenty-four hours, most major networks had journalists and film crews on the ground filing reports, and the world’s giving public, again shocked by the scale of the tragedy, began to give.

They also began to ask questions. Within seventy-two hours, criticism was being ladled out that the emergency response was too slow, that international responders were not doing enough to get aid to the victims. The ever-accelerating news cycle, aided and abetted by Web 2.0, was looking for ways to build on the story. People, not understanding the complexity of aid as anything more than truck-and-chuck logistics, grew rapidly frustrated with what they saw as unacceptable delays.

The Haitians too played to the media. Savvy and well-connected themselves, they understood the potential of broadcast images to rally support for their crisis, and there were numerous reports of crowds playing up and becoming aggressive only once the news cameras were on the scene.

Crowdsourcing of disaster response information came in to play. Use of text messaging, combined with web-based crowd-sourcing platforms, triangulated the location of trapped victims and directed search-and-rescue teams to dig them out. The question of whether this was a good thing or not remains unanswered.

Haiti became the world’s first participatory disaster in many ways. Not only were people following along with information in near-real time- and contributing to it- but so too people felt that they had a right to get directly invovled. While the South Asian Tsunami had generated a lot of startup NGOs, the scale paled compared to what happened in Haiti. Due to its proximity to the US, as well as strong ties through the Haitian diaspora there, thousands- literally- of well-meaning but thoroughly unqualified citizens filled suitcases with money and flew on over to Haiti to contribute to the relief efforts. At one point, there were reported to be over ten thousand NGOs operating in Port-au-Prince.

While the UN coordination mechanisms had become well established by the time of the Haiti earthquake, they were insufficient to deal with the sheer number of ‘humanitarian’ actors, leading to accusations of poor coordination. In fact, most major humanitarian actors were coordinating reasonably well under the circumstances. The problem was, the influx of do-it-yourself do-gooders had no knowledge of the standards of behaviour developed to manage exactly this sort of issue, and simply did their own thing. Ironically, despite nearly thirty years of increasing standardization and professionalisation of the aid sector, Haiti marked a return to the days where anybody with a heartbeat, a will, and a wad of notes could carry out aid work.

*

From its humble beginnings as a simple set of agreements around the treatment by volunteers of wounded soldiers a hundred and fifty years ago, the humanitarian sector has ballooned into a high profile, multi-billion-dollar and increasingly professional industry. The clear-cut principle of neutrality has been built upon, and then increasingly nuanced as the implications of high-value aid resources flowing into conflict and post-disaster settings has become increasingly understood. Aid workers have gone from being unsung heroes protected by their badges, to targets in an increasingly violent playing field.

Increased critical awareness of the impact of aid has led to the development of more and more standards and tools to unpack that complexity, while tragic mistakes have lent a sombre, self-critical and often cynical edge to the notion of international do-gooders.

The expectations of a giving public have shifted too, from a time when charity was the domain of churches and old ladies, to today where major emergencies become causes celebres among teenagers or corporate businessfolk, and revenues are measured in the billions. So too as the world has shrunk, ease of travel has increased, and communications media has accelerated, the giving public is increasingly interacting with disasters in near-real-time as they unfold, creating expectations often unrealistic at best, very often ignorant.

Aid now operates in a highly politicized environment with rapid changes, almost incomprehensible flows of information, and a vast and shifting range of constituents, all of whom require satisfaction on one level or another. With every major disaster or event, the aid world changes, and the goal-posts shifts.

For all its failings over the decades, one thing that stands out is that the aid industry- like many of the people who have to respond on the ground- is by very nature flexible and adaptable, changing as its circumstances change. It’s made its mistakes, and it remains a deeply flawed sector. But for all that, I couldn’t see myself in any other.

What do you think? Are there any other key events in the history of humanitarianism that you feel have had a major impact on the development of the sector?

Ten years into my career as an aid worker, I have finally brought myself around to reading Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. For those not familiar with the book, General Dallaire was the Force Commander of the United Nations Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) between 1993 and 1994, during the time of the Rwandan genocide. Shake Hands is his memoir of the events that took place during his twelve months or so in that office.

I’ve had the book on my iPad Kindle app for over 2 years, and had it on my reading list for many more. I think I delayed reading it because I knew what the content matter was going to be and, quite frankly, you kind of have to steel yourself for that sort of thing. You know before you open the first page it’s going to be a harrowing read, especially because it covers true events.

I’m not overly sensitive to these things as a rule. Over the years I’ve had to deal with horrendous subject matter coming across my desk. Pretty much the first task I was given when I started out in this line of work, back in 2003, was to synthesise what was going on at the time in the Liberian civil war, and the stuff I waded through did a good job of setting me up to deal with almost any horror stories the aid world has pitched my way since. That said, it still takes a certain energy to sink yourself into an account that deals with such tragic material.

The events in Rwanda, as well as being one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century- a period that was not short on tragedies- also act as a milestone in the development of the humanitarian industry, and I think anybody in this line of work has a responsibility to understand intimately the dynamics and processes at work during that time, how the history unfolded, and the complicity of the international community in what happened. A few years ago I read Philip Gourevitch’sWe Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families, a book that is in some ways even more harrowing than Shake Hands, although in other ways, less-so. At any rate, in my opinion both Gourevitch and Dallaire should be required reading for anybody working in the humanitarian sector. Or, for that matter, in international relations and foreign policy.

I recap the events of 1994 briefly because they are so devastating in their impact that it is inexcusable that there be any chance they might be relegated to some dusty shelf of historical anecdotes and forgotten. They must be retold so that our children, and theirs, know what transpired. I was a teenager at the time of the genocide, nearly twenty years ago now, and living in Geneva, and I suspect had more exposure to the events at the time than many people my age. Those very much younger than myself may not remember them at all. Regardless, I believe it is our responsibility to remember the victims and what happened to them, just as it is our responsibility to carry the memory of those who have died fighting just wars.

The backdrop to the genocide is complex and deep-seated. Rwanda- a tiny country in the heart of the African continent- has a population divided between two key ethnic groups- a minority Tutsi and a majority Hutu. The Tutsi did at various points over the last couple of hundred years hold a disrepresentational amount of wealth and political influence, in part exacerbated by the Belgian colonial system. A sequence of ethnic slaughters had occured over many decades, with atrocities committed by both groups. By 1993, a large contingent of Tutsis were living as refugees in Tanzania and a rebel Tutsi army was carrying out offensive operations in the north of the country against the mainly Hutu government forces (and populace). Rwanda had a government dominated by increasingly extremist Hutu elements, and the international community was attempting to broker a naive peace agreement between the belligerents.

On the night of April 6 1994, the plane transporting Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, killing all on board. Those responsible for the shooting down of the airplane have never been identified, however it is generally (though not universally) accepted that the assassination was carried out by Hutu extremists, who immediately blamed the Tutsis and used the killing as an excuse to launch what was to become the Rwandan genocide.

The genocide itself had been planned for months, if not years, with weapons stockpiled, militias organized, victims identified and a campaign of hate propaganda disseminated. It was no spontaneous chaos.

Over the next three months, while the international community failed to intervene, far-right Hutu death squads carried out a systematic and well-rehearsed annihilation of Tutsis and moderate Hutus across the country. An estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered, roughly 8-10,000 per day, most killed with machetes and farm implements. Rape and torture were systemic. The killing was only really brought to an end as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi rebel group led by Paul Kagame (now Rwanda’s President), took control of the country and drove the genocidaires, together with nearly two million Hutu refugees, into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, the violence continues nearly 20 years later.

As part of the Arusha peace negotiations, UNAMIR was given a Chapter VI (peace-keeping) mandate to monitor a cease-fire between the RPF and the Rwandan Government Forces (RGF) from late 1993 onwards. Dallaire, a Canadian, had command of this mission, and was present during the six month lead-up to the genocide, and was also on the ground throughout the height of the genocide itself and the accompanying civil war.

The United Nations has been widelycondemned for its inaction in stopping the genocide from occuring, given that it had both intelligence that plans were underway, and peacekeeping troops on the ground who, at times, stood by and watched while civilians were hacked to death in front of them. Gen. Dallaire, as UNAMIR’s Force Commander, is unavoidably tainted by this failure, and although the book only touches intermittently on the subject, consequently suffered years of psychological illness as a result of the situation he found himself in- as did many of the troops under his command.

Shake Hands is an interesting, at times awkward book structurally, because it is several things at one time. It is, at its most superficial level, a memoir of the twelve months or so that Dallaire spent in Rwanda. At another level, it is Dallaire’s own attempts to purge his demons- to put down in writing and convince himself, if nobody else, that he did all he could. And on another, it is a methodical, almost clinical account of every step, every decision, every administrative process that prevented the international community from stopping a genocide that people clearly knew was in the works before it even began.

The book is written entirely from Dallaire’s perspective and as such focuses almost exclusively on his own experiences and reactions. It hangs in an odd space of being both banal and horrifying. In the space of a single paragraph, the prose jumps from describing some bureaucratic tedium of logistics or process, to a vivid description of bloated bodies jamming a stream, or the hacking to death of a group of children.

The narrative is subjective but reads fairly. There are those he singles out for damnation- particularly the leaders of specific world powers who failed to intervene, some of the poorly-equipped and -disciplined UNAMIR military forces, and the apparently inept UN Special Representative in Rwanda. Others he praises, particularly those he served with, but others too. Whether critical or applauding, his judgement is consistently based on the merits of their actions and contributions.

There are moments when the book reads like a list of defences, as though Dallaire is trying to demonstrate at every point that his hands were tied. His approach is methodical and reflective of his military background. As far as his position is concerned, he has crossed every t, dotted every i. He does not shirk blame either but acknowledges that he has failed- one could even say that he is unduly harsh on himself- and reading between the lines, it is easy to see that behind his careful description is a soul that is tortured by a guilt it will never, ever escape.

In many ways this is the second tragedy of the book- not to compare in any way to the horror of the genocide itself. Dallaire was put in an inexcusably impossible position, and essentially hung out to dry. Dallaire’s account- and history more generally- makes it clear that the powers that could have intervened quickly to stop the killing- the US, France, Britain, and to a lesser extent Belgium and other nations- allowed the bureaucracy of the international system to tie itself in knots and found excuses not to engage. Dallaire and UNAMIR were left with negligible resources, a nearly powerless mandate, and virtually no ability to seriously defend themselves- let alone intervene against multiple hostile militant forces to protect civilians. The argument is quite clear: had Dallaire gone on the offensive with the scant troops available to him, it would have been literal suicide. Tens of thousands of people were undoubtedly saved from death by the actions that UNAMIR, under Dallaire’s initiative, did take, but the overall inaction and the weakness of the force meant that hundreds of thousands that might have been saved perished. Dallaire, caught in the middle of both the war and the criminal negligence of the international community, has to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.

It’s often said that the biggest threat to the emotional and mental wellbeing of aid workers is not the difficult scenes they witness on the ground, but the ineptitude of colleagues and the breakdown of organizational systems and political will to actually create a solution. Reading Shake Hands, the overwhelming sense is remarkably similar. The accounts of the violence visited on innocent Rwandans makes for horrible reading (though to be honest I found Gourevitch to be far more confronting from that perspective, as his journalistic style and his choice of stories made the accounts far more personal, less clinical). However what makes you come away from the book feeling sullied, angry, and deeply affected is just how simple it might have been to save 800,000 Rwandan lives, and how a broken and self-serving international system completely failed to kick into action.

There was nothing ‘new’ per se in Shake Hands that I didn’t already know. I’ve read enough accounts, visited enough analysis on Rwanda, and spent enough time in the humanitarian and international systems to understand how Rwanda was utterly failed. None the less, being taken through these failures step by step, and watching them add up- not just one error, not just ten, but a conspiracy of failures that sprawl from one end of the narrative to the other- is heartbreaking.

I came away from Shake Hands with a melancholic but intense respect for Romeo Dallaire. Like the tragic hero of an ancient epic, his story is deeply flawed. None the less, his humanity, the impossibility of his situation, and his heroic efforts to resolve it within the limits of his capacity come through.

The read is a heavy one, both in terms of the subject matter and in terms of the methodical way that Dallaire lays out the bureaucratic impediments put before him and how he worked to move the system forward. It leaves you with an anger at the decision-makers who stood by and allowed the genocide to occur. Not just the genocidaires themselves, but powerful people- Francois Mitterand, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, even the likes of Kofi Annan (then in charge of the Department of Peace Keeping Operations and who has recently released a book on the subject of the challenges of humanitarian interventions) and Boutros-Boutros Ghali (then UN Secretary General)- leaving you wondering why some of these men and women aren’t also standing before a tribunal to give account of their actions and their complicity in genocide.

Shake Hands isn’t fun, but it is an important narrative and I would seriously endorse it to anybody involved in this line of work. We all have a responsibility to understand tragedies like this. It is where history finds its highest value as a discipline- trying to ensure that we (as individuals, even if larger institutions around us fail) do not become guilty of repeating past mistakes, but work to avoid and solve them. And to take the time to unpack the sorts of complexities that a case like Rwanda presents means we’re more likely to take that time to understand the current events of our time that equally can’t be summarized by a tweet or a headline- Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, Darfur, DRC, the LRA and Myanmar to name just a few.

Sorry for the heavy post. As you can see, the book left me needing to do a little written debrief. And in its defence, going through some tough things in my own life just at the moment, it really helped me get some perspective on what really matters.

Read Shake Hands with the Devil. But maybe keep a glass of your favourite scotch handy to wind down afterwards.

NB: A note on the photo used with this review. I have never traveled to Rwanda myself- much as I would like to- but friend and fellow photographer Nick Ralph was there not long ago and snapped this gorgeous shot of a young boy with a scythe, with building rain clouds behind. I love the shot- it’s the sort of image I really like in photography, and the child, the red soil, the dark skies and the lush green backdrop are very evocative of the Rwanda that Dallaire describes in his narrative. Additionally, I like the image because, despite the sombre tones of both shot and article, it shows that 18 years on, Rwanda has taken a road towards recovery- albeit one that is incomplete and still fraught. I want to thank Nick for giving me permission to use this shot. Do check out his 500px site, where hopefully he’ll start putting more fab shots like this one up. Incidentally, Nick tells me this shot is in fact a stitch of four vertical frames. Nicely worked sir.

Somalia is understood to consist of three states of varying autonomy. ‘Somalia’, with its seat in Mogadishu, is frequently refered to as ‘South Central Somalia’, and while it alone has international recognition as a nation-state, the political forces that control the state by name in fact cling to a handful of Mogadishu suburbs, and not much else. Puntland, occupying the corner, or horn, of Somalia, is aligned with the Mogadishu government but has its own para-state structures and functions largely independantly. Somaliland, which makes up most of northern Somalia, is a semi-autonomous state that has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary since breaking away from Mogadishu, and continues to strive for international recognition.

For the last five years, al Shabbab has been growing into the most powerful insurgency group in south-central Somalia. A militant group which aligns itself with al Qaeda, al Shabbab is in effect in ‘control’ of the majority of territory in South-Central. There’s no simple way to explain the power dynamics within this portion (or any other) of Somalia. Its base is a nexus of clan affiliations and alliances of varying reliability and strength, and a combination of ideology, brutality, and ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Its main opponent is the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)- ostensibly backed by western governments who are increasingly wary of the TFG’s corruption and incompetence, and supported by an Africa Union peacekeeping mission (AMISOM) staffed largely by longsuffering Ugandans. However there are plenty of groups opposing al Shabbab from within Somalia as well, including various clan-based rivalries.

Since 2006, when al Shabbab began to rise to the fore with the splintering of the Islamic Courts Union, it has waged war not just against the TFG, but also against targets it deems representative of western influence- much in line with other militant groups such as the Taliban, and various branches of the al Qaeda network (yes, I see the redundancy there). This has included aid agencies. Between 2008 and 2009 as many as 42 aid workers were killed by al Shabbab, and by late 2010, virtually no western aid agencies (including UN agencies) had any significant presence in south-central.

While al Shabbab does exert a level of civil control with para-state structures and local governance institutions, its reach is fragile and its support services largely ineffective, with its focus on warfighting and territorial control. The impact for the Somali citizenry in al Shabbab-control territories has been a dearth of basic services- education, health, infrastructure development- and it is not coincidental that the areas which the UN last week declared a “famine” (a technical term relating to surpassing a specific threshold of mortality and malnutrition in a given population)- Bakool and Lower Shabelle- are under al Shabbab control.

In a radio interview on the 5th of July, an al Shabbab spokesperson indicated that al Shabbab was commencing drought response activities, and that it would allow support from anybody, muslim or non-muslim, who only had a humanitarian agenda.

This implied a shift in position for al Shabbab, which had banned aid agencies from its territory since 2009. The implication of the message was that western aid agencies were welcome to begin operating in its territory again, and would presumably be safe to do so. The UN has already commenced drought response operations, and many other agencies are now considering their options.

But why aren’t aid agencies pouring into Somalia as we speak? If al Shabbab have said that it’s okay, what’s the delay? Surely the need of the Somali people on the ground is so urgent that it’s now time to rush in with all our resources and do whatever we can?

Well, in some ways, yes, it is. In others, not so simple. Here are some of the issues to consider that I understand many international organizations are currently wrestling with.

Security

An invitation from al Shabbab central command may sound like a good enough reason to think aid workers would be safe re-entering south-central, but in fact it isn’t. Like many insurgency groups, al Shabbab is as much a network of affiliated warlords as it is a hierarchical paramilitary organization. Fighters on the ground- the ones with guns, grenades and IEDs- will align themselves first with their local commander, and only after that with al Shabbab central. Then there’s the assumption that the message is even getting down to those field grunts and their captains. Or the notion that some 16-year-old with an AKM, who’s never been to school but has spent the last ten years being told that westerners are pillaging his country and deserve to die, will pay any attention to some recent order from someone he’s never heard, when he sees an NGO Land Cruiser drive past.

South-central is heavily mined, and with shifting fronts and ongoing combat operations, new explosive devices are still being laid. Al Shabbab and AMISOM fight almost daily battles in and around Mogadishu and other locations, while rival clans with varying allegiances also struggle with al Shabbab fighters on multiple fronts around the region. Lawlessness and the gargantuan proliferation of small arms would make south-central an insecure prospect even without an ongoing civil war. Last I checked, the pirates who operate along Somalia’s coastline weren’t taking instructions from al Shabbab Central (admittedly they are mostly gathered further north now, in Puntland, but seriously, can anybody say “Open Season”?). Aid agencies who have had to pull out of existing programs (at al Shabbab’s instruction) may have left behind resentful community members or former staff in a culture where disagreements are often settled with firearms.

Finally, the statement- which was vague at best- comes at a time when al Shabbab continue to face uncertainty. Their territorial hold is weakening and they are increasingly being targeted by western intelligence, including drone strikes. The recent killing of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu robbed them of a senior commander, in an organization that is rife with internal power-struggles. The authority behind the statement may be in question, and if, in the midst of a power struggle, different voices take control of the leadership, what will this mean for aid agencies who have returned to the field?

In short- the statement from al Shabbab does not guarantee that aid workers are going to be safe from indocrinated and hard-core al Shabbab fighters and commanders at the field level, never mind the host of other security risks that are on offer.

Logistics

Logistics is a bit of a no-brainer. Somalia’s a remote, hostile environment where 20 years of civil war has been systematically destroying any real effort at building a local infrastructure. A network of airfields and roads (mostly unsurfaced) exists, but there are challenges which need to be overcome. Sourcing goods and supplies is hard when everything has to be flown in from outside (and recall that piracy makes shipping difficult), and agencies will have to staff their operations, many from scratch. This slows down any response, even if agencies are willing to step in.

For more discussion in a different context on some of the factors relating to why aid gets bogged down (some of which apply here), see this post on aid arriving in Haiti from last year.

Politics

Al Shabbab isn’t very popular. The TFG doesn’t like it. AMISOM is fighting a war with it. The CIA keeps bombing it. Most thinking people with a moderate worldview villify it. And now, with a famine in their back yard, most local Somalis are pretty unhappy with the way they run things too.

Tens of thousands are on the move. Thousands of kids are dying. Al Shabbab is losing support. And the outflux of population robs it of a source of new fighters for its cause. Not to mention a resource base on which its fighters draw to survive themselves.

Letting aid workers in solves many problems for al Shabbab. It demonstrates to its own people that it’s taking steps to solve the problem. It helps slow the outflux of refugees. It brings in resources that bolster the population- which may be appropriated by fighters at times, or the effects may be indirect, such as more money in the economy that supports fighters’ families which in turn supports them. And, if aid agencies don’t do the right thing by al Shabbab, it gives them fresh ammunition in the polarizing of its people against the west.

Finally, al Shabbab is being targeted by US drones. The presence of aid workers acts as a human shield. Suddenly, pickups and four-by-fours with aerials racing through al Shabbab territory may not certify a senior commander in his wagon, but perhaps a bunch of USAID consultants on their way to a project site. Ooops.

Resources

An aid operation requires resources- money, vehicles, property, supplies. These come from donors. Unfortunately, most western aid donors have very strong restrictions around dealing with terror-aligned organizations (of which al Shabbab is widely recognized as one). However operating in al Shabbab territory, it is impossible not to engage with al Shabbab, almost impossible to guarantee you haven’t inadvertantly hired an al Shabbab operative, and difficult to ascertain that some of your support doesn’t trickle down into al Shabbab’s hands. With no exemptions from western governments for aid agencies operating in these highly complex circumstances, agencies put themselves at risk of losing donor support, or at worst, criminal prosecution at the hands of donor governments, by operating in these areas.

Many aid agencies operated in south-central Somalia and were ejected by al Shabbab. Some of these did so quickly, at a metaphorical (and sometimes not-so-metaphorical) gunpoint, and in doing so, left behind not just staff and community trust, but also physical assets- cars, computers, generators, compounds. This resulted in a large financial loss to the organizations- resources that had been hard to come by in the first place, given low donor interest in Somalia. Should aid agencies begin operating again in al Shabbab territory without expecting some form of recompense for the loss of their assets? Or do they just ignore the loss of those assets, and let al Shabbab have their way, in the name of helping people? While in principle it may be easy to say that helping people is more important than getting your pound of flesh back, the reality is that agencies have been ill-able to afford the loss in the past, and now investing further in new assets and compounds to replace those lost in evacuation is coming at a cost of resources that might have gone into communities instead.

And what’s to stop al Shabbab doing it all again six months from now and seizing all those shiny new Land Cruisers? And what will donor governments say when they see their logos on the side of technicals being used to ambush AMISOM troops?

The Humanitarian Imperative

All this is very well, but of course, people- and particularly, children- are dying. And these are people who may not support al Shabbab, and certainly didn’t vote for them. Is it fair to let our organizational retisence, our principles of non-politicization, or even some fear that one or two staff members might run over a stray landmine, stop us from rushing in to Somalia to help those who need our help most?

I’m not going to give an answer. The concerns are real. The potential harm from entering this context exists- albeit, at the moment, in some analytical future. The potential harm from not entering the context also exists- and it’s real, and in our faces. But for many years now, the aid community has had to contend not just with growing security risks, but also a growing appreciation for the complexity of their operating environment and the very real need to Do No Harm. Agencies taking a bit of time to assess as best they can the potential risks should be leant some grace, just as those who rush in to begin operations without thought for potential ramifications need to ensure they’ve done their due diligence.

I hope- I sincerely hope- that as many agencies as possible and as much assistance as possible will pour into south-central Somalia. As long as the factors remain as they are, though, this will be an exceptionally challenging operation, with high risk of negative ramifications for even the most thoughtful or well-meaning response agency.

On the 9th of July 2011, Southern Sudan will declare its independence from the rest of Sudan and become the world’s newest country. It’s a moment that the Southern Sudanese and their supporters have been anticipating for many years, and comes off the back of more than five decades of warfare, punctuated by only brief breaths of peace.

Yet the news now is full of concern rather than celebration. A fresh outbreak of war seems pending, as analysts scramble to work out what’s going to happen next. Some of that analysis is far from rosy.

But what’s actually going on in Sudan? If you’re new to the Sudanese context it can be pretty confusing. What’s the fighting about and who is involved? How does the civil war that keeps getting talked about relate to the ‘genocide’ in Darfur? How did this all come about? If you’re a bit bamboozled by the bylines, this post should give you a high-level picture of how we got this far.

Map: Detailed map of Sudan’s states

Ancient History

Sudan’s a big place. The largest in Africa, the tenth largest in the world. It’s got about 40 million people, spread over nearly 600 ethnic groups- making it one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world. Over the last couple of millennium, it’s variously consisted of some 50 states.

Colonialism, in all its glory, whacked this mob together within one solid black line and called it Sudan. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and Egypt (with some customary flip-flopping) shared governance of the realm. Egypt (as a proxy caretaker on behalf of the British) governed northern Sudan from the new capital of Khartoum, while Britain administered southern Sudan at arm’s length.

The divide was more than administrative. Islam had been diffusing across northern Sudan for many centuries, while the south was largely animistic in religion and culture. The north was predominately desert and scrubland, while further south the ground grew wetter, with mixed woodland and, eventually in the far south, tropical rainforest.

The colonial division of Sudan meant that the north was effectively run as an Arab-Muslim kingdom, while the south was administered as a British colony in the order of other East African states (Kenya, Buganda, Tanganyika…), with Christian missionaries running many of the services in an otherwise sparsely-explored, -developed or even -penetrated land.

Thus, pre-existing differences in geography and resource-allocation were further entrenched through very different styles of political governance, through the adoption of opposed religious practices, and through an increased sense of Arabicization in the north versus more prominent sub-Saharan African ethnic groupings in the south.

Map: Northern Sudan in light yellow, Southern Sudan in light purple

North-South Civil War

In 1956, Sudan was granted independence as a single nation, to be governed from Khartoum and the old Arab-dominated administration left by the Egyptians. The south, resentful and distrustful of the north and its policies, had already laid the seeds for civil war with a military uprising in 1955 that led to all-out civil war. This war between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) lasted, with a brief interlude from ‘72-’83 and with various surges and lulls, until 2005, when a comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) was signed, brokered largely by the Americans.

As well as the underlying divide, the conflict also played out as part of Cold War politics. The Soviets poured weapons and funding into Khartoum in order to maintain control of Sudan’s rich oil reserves, situated largely in territory allocated to the South. (While the Cold War has ended, this continues to play a major component in the politics of war and peace in Sudan, with the Chinese blindly investing in the North in order to access rights to its resources, and the West taking an unusually intense interest in the outcome of Southern independence as well.)

The war was Africa’s longest-lasting civil conflict and claimed over 2 million lives, with 2 to 4 million people displaced as refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Decisions by the north to impose Islamic laws on the south and push for the spread of Islam (such as putting money into building mosques over other service provision) provided further incentives for the south to keep fighting. In 1989 a coup by military officers put now-President Omar al Bashir in control of the Khartoum government, and he maintained a hard stance in the conflict and in terms of pushing for the Islamicization of Sudan. (Bashir is now wanted by the International Criminal Court for war-crimes in Darfur).

The war was an uncommonly brutal one. The North made use of extensive bombing campaigns using Soviet aircraft that targeted civilians, not just military targets. Very little infrastructure was left standing in the South as a result (and at the time of the signing of the CPA in 2005, the country effectively had to start building itself from the ground up). Mass displacement led to widespread famine and disease- responsible for a large portion of the two million fatalities. As the SAF seized control of major towns and roads, the SPLA withdrew into the countryside, fighting a vicious guerrilla campaign which brought more suspicion and suffering on civilian populations. Mines were laid extensively. Human rights violations abounded.

A particular (and particularly important) facet of the war was the use of proxy militias. The political and ethnic fragmentation of the Southern portion of the country leant itself to domination by warlords, whose forces would then ally with one or other of the major warring parties. For the most part, the SPLA provided a rallying point for most of the southern militias. However at times, internal politics or external greed prompted various groups to switch sides, sometimes returning at a later point when allegiance suited. These militias often operated with a large degree of impunity and used the context of the larger war to settle local scores with neighbouring groups, resulting in more civilian casualties and atrocities. Skirmishes with these warlords and their militias have continued since the signing of the CPA.

In the midst of this, the international community launched what was at the time the largest humanitarian operation in history, Operation Lifeline Sudan. OLS was run out of Kenya, with its Forward Operating Base, Lokichoggio, a vast relief city in the desert of Turkana. Food, aid and expatriates were flown into Sudan on a daily basis in support of the southern population- arousing suspicion in Khartoum which remains to this day. At its peak, Loki was the third busiest airport on the African continent, the town thrumming each dawn with the roar of WFP cargo planes taking off for their routine food-drops. The sheer volume of aid added a new dimension to the war, with both sides attempting to manipulate this supposedly ‘impartial’ aid delivery to its own ends, forcing civilian populations this way and that to suit their resource needs.

Darfur

As hostilities between North and South were drawing down to a tacit ceasefire, simmering unrest in other parts of the nation were starting to bubble over. Khartoum’s policies of centralization, Arabicization and Islamicization had marginalized other groups. Most notable among these were a couple of prominent factions in the remote West of Sudan in a region known as Darfur: the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

From 2003, triggered by Khartoum’s exploitation of new oil reserves and seeing the level of international recognition the SPLM/A had received as a result of their push for freedom from Khartoum, the SLA and the JEM took up arms against Khartoum. Bashir’s response, as well as mobilizing regular armed forces, was to arm a militia, ostensibly made up at least partially of released prisoners, known as the Janjawid. The Janjawid, a highly mobile and often horse-backed group of vicious fighters, became synonymous with the burning of villages, the rape and murder of civilians, and implementing an unspoken policy of ethnic cleansing.

The resulting conflict became very messy, very fast. Between two and four million people fled their homes (out of a starting population of 6 million), settling in a series of IDP camps across a desolate and arid area the size of France, largely lacking roads or other infrastructure. Chad, resentful of the support that Khartoum had given to opposition rebel groups during its own civil war years earlier, poured support into the Darfur rebels which resulted in a tense and lawless cross-border situation. The humanitarian operation was stymied by a Khartoum government which was both belligerent and distrustful of the incoming aid agencies, and also had no vested interest in seeing the population supported. Red tape was thrown up at any opportunity, while aid agencies were frequently punished with expulsion and the revocation of permits.

The fighting continued. The war was characterized as being one between Arabs and ‘Africans’, although on ethnic terms the differentiation was hazy at best. However at day’s end, as well as the macro-level context of an uprising by a marginalized people against a non-representative and distant government, this was really a resource conflict. The players polarized themselves largely along the lines of groups that traditionally practiced sedentary agriculture versus those that traditionally practiced more nomadic livestock rearing. The conflict, at its most basic, was about who controlled wells, grazing land and firewood and, from a government perspective, the small but significant new finds of oil.

Over the next few years, the conflict fragmented. The government lost control of the Janjawid, while the rebel groups split into around 30 different forces, with alliances shifting so rapidly they were almost impossible to track, let alone resolve. Banditry- partly to resource fighting, partly for profit for its own sake- blossomed, and aid workers with their shiny Land Cruisers, disposable cash and walkie-talkies were prime targets. Anarchy reigned.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere…

At the same time the SLA and JEM were consolidating their struggle for recognition, groups in the far east of the country, in Kassala and Red Sea States, were instigating their own rebellion. With support from the SLA and JEM, militias like the Beja Congress under the flag of the Eastern Front also started a low-key insurgency, and while it didn’t get far, it remains a tense point to this day.

In Kordofan, like Darfur consisting of three states- West, South and North- the conflict from Darfur was spilling over. For a while analysts were concerned that it was going to explode in the same way as Darfur, but while there were a number of reports of village massacres, the focus remained on Darfur.

Several areas remained, however, flashpoints for violence. Kordofan had been deeply divided during the North-South wars, with militias (most notably the Nuba) aligning with the South while the state remained occupied by the North. Likewise portions of Blue Nile (belonging to the North) and Upper Nile (belonging to the South) were made up of a patchwork of proxy militias and their complex alliances, which continue to simmer to this day.

There is, of course, the contentious Unity State. Unity- never a more inappropriately named location- is apparently sopping with oil, and is subsequently claimed by both the North and the South. Under the 2005 CPA, Unity’s future was supposed to be determined by a state referendum, but neither the North nor the South could agree on a structure to the referendum, particularly because the North wanted Arab nomads who crossed the territory to be given a vote (as they would vote to join the North) while the South did not.

One of the biggest threats to the stability of Southern Sudan as a nation is its very ethnic diversity. Conflict between ethnic groups, clans and even families at a very local level has strong currency in the micro-politics of the area. Disagreements, usually over cattle or women, used to be settled with spears, bows and knives. Today they are settled with 7.62mm rounds on fully-automatic. Interclan tussles used to score their casualties in ones and twos. Now they’re counted in twenties and forties. While the North-South war kept a lid on much of this and provided a common enemy to unite otherwise-belligerent factions, since the signing of the CPA there has been a marked increase in ethnic tension in Southern Sudan. If war with the North does not eventuate, the SPLM will still need to contend with this very real threat to remain viable.

In the last few years, the despicable Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), pushed ever northwards by the Ugandan army, has established itself in the forests of Western Equatoria, in the far south of the country. Known for its brutal campaigns against villages- seizing children as soldiers, porters and sex slaves- it has continued its trademark attacks against Sudanese villages and continues to create tension in that area.

In many ways, Sudan and its constituents are holding their breath. This year’s referendum, timetabled by the CPA and independently monitored, clearly stated that the South (as voted on by Southerners) would cecede- a vote of 99%. This is clearly not in the interests of the North, but for now, the North has little power to stop this from happening without angering the entire International Community. This doesn’t stop it playing games. Like cutting off the South’s access to its oil pipeline for export.

From there, SAF incursions into Unity State (Abyei) late in May made international headlines as the potential signal for an impending civil war post-independence. Whether designed to test international waters and the Southern reaction, whether planned as a pre-positioning of forces, whether a statement of ownership, or whether to drive out pro-South populations, the move demonstrated the weakness of the UN resolve to step in and intervene.

It also demonstrated the unwillingness- for now- of the SPLA to respond with significant force. This can be chalked up to the SPLM’s concern that nothing should jeopardize the handover of independence in 2 weeks’ time. After the July 9 transition, their restraint may be weaker.

The United Nations has been instructed by Khartoum to end its mandate in Sudan once the South has its independence. That means from July 9, the UN will need to withdraw its peacekeepers from any territory controlled by the north, including South Kordofan.

(Rumours that the UN in the South may also be asked to leave- possibly an internal political manoeuvre relating to dissatisfaction with bilateral donor support for the SPLM- are currently unsubstantiated, but this also would create a significant concern in the light of increasing tensions.)

A tentative agreement has been reached by both the North and the South that a contingent of Ethiopian peacekeepers will take control of Abyei while a long-term solution is agreed. Of course, it’s been 6 years that a long-term solution has been discussed and still hasn’t been reached. But it’s better than slinging it out.

Meanwhile, Khartoum has refocused its efforts on Kordofan, with evidence of troop buildup, ethnic cleansing, arbitrary execution of political dissidents, and 60- to 100,000 people displaced from their homes (claims of up to half a million by local leaders). Strategically close to Abyei and Unity State, Khartoum may well be prepositioning itself for a much larger incursion.

Rumours of instability in Blue Nile are growing, with concerns about militia groups there and across the border in Upper Nile. Should conflict between North and South erupt, this will almost certainly become a major area of concern- and probably a highly complex one.

Although the war in Darfur is ‘different’ to the North-South conflict, many of the drivers- fear of Islamicization, Arabicization, marginalization, resource exploitation- are the same. The SLA and JEM (as still the major rebel figureheads negotiating with Khartoum) very much take their lead from what happens in the South, which they see as setting a precedent for their own struggle. What impact Southern independence, or a possible return to war with the South, triggers in Darfur remains to be seen. However with anarchy and banditry continuing to dominate, with the ongoing belligerent attitude of Khartoum towards NGOs, and with the UN having to close its mandate in the North, some impact is certain.

Sudan has it all. Beligerent governments. Long-standing ethnic grievences. Oil and resource conflict. Warlords with wavering loyalties. A harsh, unsupportive and disease-prone environment. Poor infrastructure. High aid dependency coupled with suspicion towards the international community. A contested border. High levels of international ‘interest’ in the outcome. And a lot of guns. And I mean, a lot.

Many observers agree that the Southern government is unlikely to embrace any large-scale response to hostilities this side of July 9. The government is occupied with managing transition- and ensuring it goes ahead. Even beyond that time, the SPLA does not have the training or equipment that the SAF possesses (not to say that certain western governments aren’t doing their damnedest to correct that imbalance). Whether we see a return to all-out war between North and South in the near future isn’t clear; it may not swing that way. However with the build-up of tension and troops in flashpoint areas such as Southern Kordofan and mutterings along the Nile, the chances of low-level conflict remain very high.

A likely campaign from the North, based on past performance, would involve the use of proxy militias in sensitive areas. These would be used to drive out pro-South populations and secure- de facto if not de jure- the areas it wants to control. The South may respond with similar tactics, or pour in more regular troops which could considerably escalate the conflict. Whichever path results, the outcome for civilian populations caught in the middle is grim.

That said, there’s no war yet. Negotiations over Abyei and Unity continue. While the North doesn’t want to lose its oil, if it declares war on the South it will exacerbate its international pariah status and find that China really does become its one and only ally- something which Bashir may be okay with, but will not do Sudan as a nation any favours over time. Likewise Southern Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, despite his cowboy appearance, has no wish for his fledgling nation to be embroiled in conflict while trying to consolidate a functioning state infrastructure. The South’s struggle to lift itself from what is undoubtedly one of the lowest rungs of the Human Development ladder will be hard enough without a war.

Note: I realise that many of my readers are going to be Sudan ‘experts’ with knowledge and information beyond what I have expressed here. Please do feel free to add commentary, facts or analysis I may have missed in the comments section- and yes, I know I have oversimplified some of what is a crazy complex context in this post!

This story appeared on the ABC yesterday, with the leader “Australian Aid Going to Terrorist-Funded Camp“. When you manage to squeeze by the alarmist headline, you read that international NGO Save the Children- which receives Australian government and private funding- is operating in the same camp as the charitable wing of a group which is on an international terrorism watchlist. The World Food Program- also a recipient of Australian support- is also in the camp.

Gasp! You mean that there’s a group of internally displaced people in a relief camp who’ve been left destitute by one of the biggest natural disasters the world has seen since Noah’s time, and Save the Children and WFP are trying to help them, and a charity funded by an Islamic Extremist group is also coincidentally working in the same camp?

FIF, the charity in question, receives funding from an organization called Jamaat-ad-Dawa, which is considered a parent organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a high-profile group which has been accused of being behind the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. I’m not a big fan, and I’ll say that straight up.

Many Islamic extremist groups do fund charity work. It’s hard to know motivations. It’s quite possible that they use the opportunity to win ‘hearts-and-minds’ and find new recruits. It’s also possible that they are simply carrying out charitable actions. Alms-giving (Zakat) is, after all, a pillar of the Islamic faith, and charitable giving (Sadaqah) is also an important principle of faith (not that I particularly want to draw a strong correlation between such groups, and stand-up examples of what Islaam should look like as a faith in practice).

Admittedly, given the parent company, I certainly wouldn’t choose to work alongside FIF.

I will say, however, that there will be dozens and dozens of examples of organizations working in relief camps in Pakistan which receive money from groups that either carry out or promote action around Islamic Extremism- and they will be working in the same camps as established NGOs that come from countries (like Australia) that battle Islamic Extremism.

The fact that Save, WFP, and FIF are all working in the same camp is utterly meaningless. The FIF is not training terrorists. A worst case scenario is that FIF is quietly trying to subvert a few disenfranchised young men into joining their cause- although Sukkur is not the hotbed of fundamentalist resistance that a place like Peshawar is. Even then, Save and WFP are not giving their money to FIF. They’re not giving their money to terrorists. Their money is not supporting terrorists in any shape or form. Even if, through some chain of events, some of the young men in the camp do eventually decide to join insurgents and take part in terror-style attacks in the future, this has nothing whatsoever to do with Save, or the UN, or any other donor.

In fact, under International Humanitarian Law, the people in these camps- assuming they are not in uniform or toting weapons- are civilians in need of assistance. Even if it so happens that Save and WFP have some overlap in the individuals they offer support to as FIF, they continue to operate under the principle of the Humanitarian Imperative, and are ethically and legally in the right.

This is not to excuse the international community from taking seriously their responsibility to Do No Harm, and to avoid contributing to or supporting a conflict. Questions need to be asked. We learned this the hard way after the RwandaGenocide.

But for the love: Can we please do so in an intelligent fashion?

Save the Children, WFP, and many other NGOs have extensive experience working in complex emergencies where there are multiple warring factions. They analyse their partners, and they invest in understanding the context to avoid as much as possible causing harm or exacerbating existing tensions. Sometimes, they make mistakes.

In this instance, a cogent analysis of this inflammatory headline indicates that the agencies in question are doing nothing wrong, that there’s no solid evidence to indicate that funding by anyone (including, at this stage, the FIF) is being used to further a cause contrary to that of the Australian government (not that the UN or Save have any need or responsibility to worry about this; quite the opposite), and that in fact right now, the most important thing is that people in need are being supported.

The article has taken a non-event, and spun it in the most unhelpful way it could. It has thrown an uncessary political lens over two reputable humanitarian agencies, implied (via the headline) that their activities are risky (or at very least uninformed), and has run the risk of undermining Australian government and private support to humanitarian agencies in Pakistan.

Truth is more than just relaying facts; the relaying of facts in a way that implies a reality that is a distortion is, in my opinion, sacrificing that truth.

The facts of this article may be true (especially when you read through the whole piece); but the article has taken what is merely a confluence of events, and has spun them in such a way to create intrigue for the sake of garnering readership. The attention-grabbing headline implies that the camp is ‘funded by’ terrorists, while the reality is that an aid group which receives its funds from an organization which also carries out terrorist attacks happens to be carrying out operations in the camp; it plays on ignorant fears in the Australian public that terror in Pakistan is somehow an imminent threat to Australian public safety; it subversively calls into question the reliability of two proven and experienced aid agencies; and it stokes the fear that if you give money to the Pakistan emergency, you may end up inadvertantly funding terror activities.

I won’t say that there’s no chance that funds given to the Pakistan emergency will make it into the hands of extremist organizations. Flows of money and the relationships between communities and community-based organizations like LeT and Tahrik-e Taliban are highly complex and utterly impossible to map in any conventional way. Organizations make mistakes. (Though for my own opinions on terrorism, insurgency and aid agencies, see a couple of my earlier posts). I will say that if you’re giving to established agencies, signatory to the Red Cross Code of Conduct and with demonstrated historical experience of operating in complex contexts and conflicts, the chances of your funds being mis-spent in this way are extremely low- and any links would be highly tenuous at best.

While this headline spinning is a commercially understandable (and expectable) practice to create click-throughs, in a situation like Pakistan’s it verges on the exploitative. Especially when you consider the potential risk to donor support for the emergency response should people (in their ignorance) read the headline and believe that they are supporting car-bombings in Islamabad and Bali.

I expect news agencies like the Herald Sun or Fox News to run with uninformed, sensationalist reportage of this sort. But from a reputable source like the ABC I would have expected far more.

We understand when readers don’t necessarily engage with reported facts with a great deal of critical analysis, but is it really too much to ask our journalists to at least help us in that process?

Images:

Both taken from The Australian website, source links via photos

1. “Fears of Disease in Flood-Hit Pakistan, as Nearly a Million Lose their Homes”